Digital Marketing 2016 Europe: my takeaways

It is difficult to summarise 2 days of great marketing presentations, networking and insights. I might have missed sessions and topics, and for this reason this post cannot be representative for the full event. So, here are my very personal perspective and takeaways. Sometime items might be disconnected: the post is coming directly from my meeting notes and I simply had no time to consolidate and secure a proper logic flow.

Content Marketing

Content Marketing was the key topic with multiple presentations (including my contribution) and workshops. Based on a survey from Frost, CM represents the main investment planned by marketing departments in 2016 (TradeShows the item suffering the most substantial decrease).

No more content, more quality content. Too much content is the general concern. The feeling is shared among the majority of the audience.

Content creation can be centralised but still we have a last mile of decentralisation due to SEO and keywords

Segmentation by persona (even if with different flavours) and customer journeys are common techniques adopted by content marketing strategists. Content, distribution channels and marketing tactics are based on different steps of the customer journey (eg. customers are adverse to paid media in the knowledge phase of customer journey, since they’re looking for information).

Internal and external influencers are key-factors of success for a content marketing strategy.

Storytelling and emotional connections play a key-role in content marketing (great presentation from Zurich’s CMO).

Content strategy comes first. Channel strategy follows (and I was very vocal with this point).

Marketing innovation rising in B2B

B2B is no longer a “Boring to Boring” environment. For the first time B2B is adopting marketing innovation and technologies at a fastest speed than B2C.

B2B and B2C share same challenges. Interesting to see enterprises of different sizes (HP, Zurich, Xerox) and geographies approaching similar issues, sometime with different approaches and methodologies.